2024The Design Language of Nature - Sheetlets

People in every culture throughout the world use regular patterns to decorate artefacts and other objects. We also observe these patterns in nature, based on geometrical shapes such as rectangles, star patterns, circles, spheres and cylinders. When these shapes are combined, all sorts of complex patterns emerge underpinned by mathematical principles. The design language of nature stamps feature photographs of plants and animals that display these geometrical patterns, including spirals (a curved line around a defined point that gets ever closer or further away from the point) and symmetry (where one half of an object is the mirror image of the other half). Other patterns represented include fractals (where geometric shapes are precisely replicated in different sizes) and Fibonacci sequences (a sequence in which each element is the sum of the two preceding elements). These four regular patterns are linked together on the stamp sheet using the golden ratio, sometimes referred to as the divine proportion, that is also observable in nature. In the golden ratio, the largest of two parts is in proportion to the smallest part, while the whole is in proportion to the largest part. The ratio found is called the golden number and is denoted by the Greek letter phi. The design language of nature stamps depict the following animals and plants: panther chameleon and Christmas tree worm (spirals), romanesco cauliflower and fern (fractals), dandelion, sunflower, nautilus shell and dahlia (Fibonacci sequence), monarch butterfly and tiger (symmetry).